Everyone in the business world is familiar with Cisco Systems, the behemoth California-based company that designs, manufactures, and sells networking equipment. With annual revenues of more than 50 billion U.S. dollars, Cisco is one of the world leading vendors of B2B network and telecom equipment.
Most businesses have either an entire network, or at least some Cisco hardware and software applications forming part of their network. Video conferencing tools like Cisco WebEx and other cloud based UC communication apps can make up part of your network. On top of that, there are other elements that add complexity, including hundreds of switches, routers and access points.
With any network, an outage could bring your UC infrastructure to its knees, costing valuable time and money through loss of productivity - and may directly impact your bottom line.
The impact of a service outage
When an organization’s network experiences an outage, the effects can be anywhere from slightly disruptive to disastrous. In total, IT outages cost North American businesses $700 billion per year.
These losses are directly related to revenue, internal productivity, mitigation costs, and could even negatively impact your brand. Depending on the size of an organization and its industry, a single hour of downtime caused by an outage can translate to $250,000 to $300,000.
A network outage means the loss of your network resources, including routers, switches, and transport facilities. It directly impacts customer experience as well as productivity throughout all your teams. An outage can be caused through:
- Varying degrees of failure of hardware and software components
- Disruption to power supplies
- Scheduled maintenance including software or hardware upgrades
- Operational faults like configuration errors
- Disasters such as floods, tornadoes, and earthquakes
Improve the performance of Unified Communications within your business
Third party monitoring for incident prevention
The biggest challenge in preventing outages is identifying root causes in advance, and predetermining their effects. This highlights the need for proactive processes to monitor your network, identify risks, and deploy preemptive measures.
Monitoring your network using Cisco monitoring tools will help to identify risk, help fix problems faster and even reduce the chances of future error. But what about when your UC & collaboration network consists of multi-vendor hardware and software? Cisco Third party monitoring tools won't allow you to proactively monitor other systems, check service status or identify the root cause of an outage anywhere outside of the Cisco platform.
For example, what if remote users want to join a Cisco WebEx meeting through a Zoom room, and there's an outage issue. There could be any number of reasons for an interruption to services, but Cisco monitoring tools will only identify the problem if it's a Cisco problem.
Monitoring multi-vendor networks
Full monitoring and troubleshooting capability across multi-vendor systems means collecting data and information, accessing reports, services and status analytics - and allowing these analytics to be accessed by all of your teams. This is where third party monitoring and troubleshooting tools are vital to your business, not just to combat outages and related issues in your Cisco environment, but across your entire network.
Each vendor designs and distributes specific management interfaces where CLI or API designs differ, creating numerous parameters and configurations for IT teams or engineers to put in place - and problems monitoring and troubleshooting your network's topology.
Turning metrics into intelligence
Monitoring is not just about collecting cloud metrics or flow data. Monitoring transforms these analytics into uniform metrics for base lining, alerting and trending. Whether your UC environment consists of single, multi-vendor, hybrid, cloud or on-premises components, you need to be able to see all activity through a single window. You can see where outages happen, how regularly they occur, how much downtime they cause - and use this intelligence to manage and prevent such incidents in the future.
Manage Cisco UC outages with Collaborate
IR Collaborate provides visibility across multi-vendor ecosystems, including Cisco, as well as other major vendor platforms, giving IT teams and managers a clear view through a single pane of glass. No matter what your UC landscape looks like, whether you're using cloud collaboration tools like Cisco WebEx, Zoom, Microsoft Teams or others, Collaborate can monitor performance and help prevent downtime through outages.
Find out how Collaborate can help you fix the root-cause of problems quickly so you can minimize user impact.
